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YOUTUBE: United Airlines: San Francisco (SFO) to Paris (CDG)
YOUTUBE: Turkish Airlines: Paris (CDG) to Istanbul (IST)
YOUTUBE: Pegasus Airlines: Istanbul (SAW) to Kayseri (ASR)
YOUTUBE: Turkish Airlines: Nevsehir (NAV) to Istanbul (IST)
YOUTUBE: Turkish Airlines: Istanbul to Chicago (ORD)
The Turkish Business Class Lounge in Istanbul is one single large lounge for all passengers, and it has everything you could possibly want in a lounge, and some of the best lounge food anywhere in the world.
Table of Contents
Lounge Entrance
Once you pass security, you’ll see signage directing you in the direction of 2 possible lounges. The Turkish Miles & Smiles lounge is to the left, and the business class lounge is to the right. These lounges are quite literally identical, but for the purposes of crowding, Turkish made two distinct lounges for Star Alliance status holders and purely business class travelers. We will be checking out the latter today.
As you are walking to the Business class lounge, you’ll see a small opening on the left of what looks like the lounge entrance. This entrance is for if you have a disability or need the elevator. The main entrance is further down so keep walking and follow the overhead signs.
Eventually you’ll turn the corner towards the gates and see this big sign and there is an escalator immediately to the left and you can enter from there.
At the top you’ll see this big entrance and a set of turnstiles to scan your boarding pass to enter. Do note that you’ll also need to scan your boarding pass on the way out to exit, so keep your boarding pass handy when exiting the lounge as well.
Access Requirements
Given that this particular lounge is only for premium cabin travelers, the entrance rules are quite simple:
- Turkish Airlines Business Class Passengers
- Star Alliance Member Airline First and Business Class Passengers
If you are a Star Alliance Gold member, or a certain card holder, there is a Turkish Miles and Smiles lounge across the hall that is identical to this one that you can access. Turkish created 2 separate lounges just to separate the crowd a little.
Seating
Given that this lounge is the only lounge for all Star Alliance flights from IST, you can imagine there is a lot of different seating throughout the lounge.
The other direction has shower suites which we’ll look at later.
Away from the rest of the lounge are these private-esque working stations if you want some quiet space.
There’s also some proper working desks with macs if needed for whatever reason.
Now coming back to the main side of the lounge, there’s a lot of white couch seating options along the walls.
Alongside the couch seating there’s also table seats under these cabana-like structures in the middle of the room. Beware though, should you need to charge any devices, these tables won’t have them.
There’s also this news room with 12 different screens and some couches here to watch if there’s anything that fascinates you.
As you go further back, there’s more of that table seating with some booth style seating like what you’d find in restaurants.
As you go further back in the lounge, you find more open space with more couch-like seating.
There’s another corridor of the lounge away from the center with more couch seating.
Despite the large amount of seating, the one thing I noticed was that power ports weren’t abundantly available throughout every single seat. I had to actively find seats that had them.
There were a few other rooms off to the side with more kinds of seating
There were also some loungers hidden away if you wanted to catch a few ZZZs. There is a dedicated nap room by the showers that’s separate from this. So if you have a long long layover and your itinerary is eligible, check that out.
Food and Beverage
Turkish Airlines absolutely excels in the food department when it comes to their lounge and onboard food. We’re about to see all the awesome food they have here.
You’ll see a couple of these stone houses lined up in the lounge, and inside of them, chefs will be cooking a few different local specialties. Along the sides you’ll see water and soft drinks like in the pictures below.
One of the stone houses had cooks preparing gozleme, a turkish flatbread stuffed with meats, spinach, and cheese.
The other stonehouses had other dishes as well.
There was also a counter that had a lot of salad items and condiments.
Next to that was also bread and soup stand. Bear in mind all these hot items had live cooks and were being stocked regularly. Turkish is really doing a good job managing all this.
The lounge didn’t have a staffed bar, however they had a wine cart and they also had a few stand with hard alcohol available that I didn’t photograph.
Nearby there was also a wall of drinks that had lots of water, soft drinks, juices
If you like Turkish bagels, you could get some of that too by the soup.
Ayran is a popular Turkish yogurt drink that you might enjoy. Variants of this drink is found across other middle eastern and South Asian countries.
There was also a live barista making pretty much any coffee drink that you wanted. Im not a coffee drinker, so this station wasn’t my area of specialty, but it seemed like they had a lot of things going on here
There was also another live cooking station towards the back of the lounge where they were cooking chicken in some sauce.
The back of the lounge also had a huge dessert table with a variety of western, and Turkish desserts.
And of course, we are in Turkey and flying a Turkish carrier, so we have to have some baklava and other Turkish sweets to go along with it. 
baklava + Turkish cookies
There was also another one of those drink stands here that had all kinds of non-alcoholic drinks. Here you’ll find waters, soft drinks, fruit juices, and even Turkish drinks such as ayran and salgam.
One of the rooms has a wonderful tea setup. However there were no strainers, so I wasn’t quite sure how to enjoy the fresh tea leaves.
I wasn’t sure if the traditional way was to put the leaves into your tea glass simply, but if not, then there was no catcher to remove the leaves.
There was also a table with fruits and lemonade
You also had a wide variety of biscuits.
Showers + Nap Rooms
This lounge also has showers and nap rooms. Now I could not take pictures of any of the nap rooms as they were all occupied when I was there, There were several of them so I must have just caught a bad time, however you have to have a long enough layover to be eligible to use them. A simple 2-3 hour layover won’t cut it.
As for the showers, those are available to use for all passengers as long as you present a boarding pass.
Each shower suite was very stylish and had nice finishes.
There was also a nice full sized mirror and vanity mirror with a bright white light so you are able to see yourself clearly.
You have a towel, bathmat, hair dryer, smaller towels, slippers, and a bunch of other amenities to complement your shower experience.
You even got your own bathrobe, which I did not get a chance to enjoy because I was in quite a rush.
The shower was a waterfall style shower and it should cover the height for almost all normal sized humans.
In case you don’t have your own, the showers did come with their own shampoo, shower gel, and conditioner.
Summary
Turkish’s business class lounge in Istanbul is truly a jack of all trades and one of the best lounges in the world. You have a wide variety of seating sections, some of the best food anywhere on this planet, an absurdly wide range of food options, spacious showers & nap rooms, and lots of other cool things like a golf simulator and kids’ play area. For a lounge this size, I did wish there was a fully staffed bar or at least more comprehensive alcoholic options. Right now, there’s just a wine trolley and a hard liquor section, which seems a little lacking for a flagship lounge. The service was also a little slow as sometimes there were lots of tables with used plates and glasses. Now, this lounge is huge, so there’s not any particular staff to blame; maybe more staff would be beneficial.
But all things considered, this lounge is awesome and if you have time, you should leave lots of time for this lounge to fully indulge in all that it has to offer.
In some respects, the Turkish Airlines business loans is in fact quite impressive. The variety of food offered his impressive, and it’s good that there is a number of quite different seating areas. For all it’s well deserved praise, I would like to mention a few drawbacks that you would not expect in a place that considers itself one of the best business class lounges in the world:
1. The place is huge, but it has also a huge number of visitors. Quiet corners are few and far between, and the high occupancy rate and the accompanying din make it impossible to find the concentration to do some real work there. There is a limited number of fairly quiet business pods, but they are far too few and constantly occupied.
2. USB ports are available only in the business pods. Apart from that, you are literally left to your own devices.
3. Booze is very little and difficult to find.
4. At the moment, a big chunk of the facility is under reconstruction which makes the place even less welcoming.
All in all, and not wishing to discount the impressive variety of food and soft drinks at offer, the Turkish Airlines business Lounge at Istanbul Airport is not a Business Lounge in the conventional sense. It is an upper class food court. It cannot compete with the far more sophisticated business class lounges in the East Asian and Gulf area airports.
Agreed the alcohol is very skimpy and the lounge does feel like a giant food court and is very crowded. I do think this lounge has all the facilities and amenities to be one of the best business class lounges out there, but could do with a bit of crowd relief. Perhaps a Turkish lounge in each of the piers could go a long way in alleviating that crowd, which is all consolidating in the main lounge right now. Amongst the world’s largest airlines this is very much an issue. Take Air France, Take Lufthansa, etc. They also have crowded lounges however the quality is nowhere near Turkish in a lot of regards.